Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who is feared murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, was much more than just a Washington Post columnist: he was a figure connected to some of the highest echelons of power in the US and Saudi Arabia.

Whitney Webb, staff writer at MintPress News and author of a recent piece on the disappeared Saudi journalist, joined Radio Sputnik's Fault Lines on Tuesday to flesh out Khashoggi's personal and family history and his deep connections to the military-industrial complex in the United States, as well as the highest levels of the Saudi state, in an effort to understand why the US is reacting so strongly to his presumed death at Saudi hands.

Organic Consumers Association Mexico (ACO), a project of US-based Organic Consumers Association (OCA), today announced that samples of Maseca brand white and yellow corn flours tested positive for residues of glyphosate and its main metabolite, AMPA. Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup weedkiller.

"It's clear from our testing that Maseca's claims of selling a 'natural' and 'nutritious' product are false and misleading," said OCA's international director, Ronnie Cummins. "Consumers in Mexico and the US who care about pesticide contamination and GMOs should seek organic non-GMO alternatives to Maseca flours until the company agrees to source only non-GMO grains for its products."

The first-ever child pornography suspect named to the FBI's Most Wanted list cashed out his life savings and was fleeing law enforcement on a bus traveling across Montana last year when another passenger noticed child pornography on his laptop screen.

When the bus stopped in Billings, the passenger confronted Eric Franklin Rosser. Rosser, a former keyboardist for John Mellencamp, was arrested. He pleaded guilty last week to accessing the internet to view child pornography.

The main takeaway from the IMF and World Bank Group annual meeting in Bali, which hosted financial ministers and central bank governors from around the world this weekend, was that global trade tensions were having a profound effect on global growth and need to be solved.

Most of the participants - save for China and Mexico - seemed united and in agreement that trade talks have to continue. Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda stated that it was essential to have dialogue on trade while at the same time, the president of Brazil's central bank, Ilan Goldfajn, noted that the trade wars were one of the biggest threats to emerging markets. Indonesia's president Jokowi Widodo said starkly that "winter is coming" for the global economy if there is no solution on trade.

It wasn’t much snow, but it still broke a record set 120 years ago for Kansas City.

Kansas City International Airport reported that .2 of an inch of snow fell at the airport on Sunday. That makes it the earliest measurable snowfall for the season.

Sen. Susan Collins' husband and dog were quarantined on Monday until the hazmat team cleared her home after a letter arrived that was said to contain ricin, a highly toxic poison.

Her office called it 'the latest in a series of threats' against the senator, who was the target of multiple protests during Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation process.

After the all clear was given, the Collins were allowed to spend Monday night at their Bangor, Maine, home.

At least nine Palestinians, including a journalist, were killed by Israeli forces on the Gaza border on Friday, as thousands of demonstrators burned tyres and sent towers of thick black smoke billowing over the isolated Mediterranean enclave.

The latest fatalities mean that 31 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli snipers since Gaza residents last week began “the Great March of Return”, a series of weekly border protests demanding the right to return to their ancestral homes in what is today Israel.

A Turkish official told AP that police have found evidence inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul which confirms that journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed there.
The "high level official" spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity, but said that police had found "certain evidence"that Khashoggi had died in the building. The official did not provide any more details about the evidence uncovered by police.

Reports in US media on Monday evening suggested that Riyadh might be preparing to admit that Saudi-born Khashoggi was killed as part of an unauthorized interrogation gone wrong.

Khashoggi was last seen entering the consulate on October 2. Turkey has accused Saudi Arabia of murdering the journalist, but Riyadh has denied involvement.

After a phone call with Saudi Arabia’s King Salman on Monday, US President Donald Trump suggested perhaps “rogue killers” had been responsible for the journalist’s disappearance.

Facebook is not private. They are partnered with a NATO backed think tank to censor their platform that is funded by the US government.

The American, French and Washington-backed forces have been excavating historical sites in Manbij region in Northeastern Aleppo to discover and steal the country's artifacts and precious metals, a Syrian media outlet reported on Monday.

The Arabic-language al-Watan daily quoted local sources in Northeastern Aleppo as disclosing that the French and US forces and the Washington-backed militias have excavated a number of historical sites in Manbij, adding that they have sped up their excavation operation after unearthing gold and artifacts.

The daily further said that the US and French forces have found a large volume of gold in Tal Um al-Saraj and Tal al-Sayad in Manbij, adding that they have also discovered an ancient tablet in another excavation operation in an industrial zone in Manbij.

The paper went on to say that the foreign occupiers along with the local militias have stared excavation operation to unearth the precious metal that is made of lead.

The United States has sold over $55 billion of weapons during the 2018 fiscal year, a sharp year-on-year increase in the wake of President Donald Trump’s push to encourage more US arms sales.

That’s 33 percent more than fiscal year 2017, Trump’s first year in office, when the Pentagon contractors managed to sell almost $42 billion in weapons and military services around the globe, according to the latest report by the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency.

According ding to the report, the Pentagon funded $4.42 billion of the 2018 foreign purchases while an additional $3.52 billion in arms sales was funded by the State Department. The buyers paid for the rest of the sales themselves.

The deals included the sales of a significant number of aircraft and equipment, including Boeing deals to sell surveillance aircraft in Asia and Europe.

Saudi Arabia is preparing to admit that journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed in its consulate, it was reported last night.

But the government will claim he died in a botched interrogation that King Salman and Prince Mohammed did not authorise, sources told CNN.

According to the publication, the Saudi Arabian government is preparing a report which will say Khashoggi was supposed to be taken to the kingdom but died in the consulate during interrogation.

CNN said that two sources had leaked the report, which could change' and is 'still being prepared'.

George Beebe’s recent analysis has presented the policy community with a very useful paradigm for understanding recent alleged actions taken by the Russian special services in a number of Western countries: the Skripal Rorshchach test .

Beebe is referring specifically to the attempted murder of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal on British soil by use of a Soviet-developed nerve agent that sickened him and his daughter and killed several British citizens - amidst growing evidence of the involvement of officers of Russian military intelligence (the GRU). That case can be broadened to encompass a series of computer hacking/information warfare operations that were uncovered in the last several weeks in the UK, the United States, Canada and the Netherlands, which also have been attributed to the GRU. Now the discussion revolves around whether those who have been accused of taking action were doing so in contravention of or in support of the instructions of the Russian state.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said he would 'sanction the hell' out of Saudi Arabia and had harsh words for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the man alleged to have ordered the interrogation and killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul.

Graham, who described himself as Saudi Arabia's 'biggest defender in the Senate,' turned on the U.S. ally, saying Crown Prince Mohammed - who is often referred to by his initials MBS - is a 'toxic' figure who 'has got to go.'

'I'm not going back to Saudi Arabia as long as this guy is in charge,' Graham announced on 'Fox & Friends' on Tuesday morning.

Poland raised its gold holdings to the highest in at least 35 years, data from the International Monetary Fund showed on Monday.

The country increased its holdings by 4.4 tonnes from August to about 117 tonnes in September, a record, according to data going back to January 1983.

The Cherokee Nation on Monday afternoon called out Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) for attempting to claim Native American heritage by releasing the results of a DNA test.

The test, conducted by a Stanford University professor Carlos Bustamante, showed that Warren has a Native American ancestor going back six to 10 generations ago, making her somewhere between 1/32nd and 1/1,024th American Indian.

The Cherokee Nation in a statement said using a DNA test to claim connection with a tribal nation is “inappropriate” and “wrong.”

“Using a DNA test to lay claim to any connection to the Cherokee Nation or any tribal nation, even vaguely, is inappropriate and wrong,” said Cherokee Nation Secretary of State Chuck Hoskin Jr. “It makes a mockery out of DNA tests and its legitimate uses while also dishonoring legitimate tribal governments and their citizens, whose ancestors are well documented and whose heritage is proven.”

My favorite Elizabeth Warren story involves a cookbook. Warren, who was at that time posing as a trailblazing Cherokee, actually contributed recipes to a recipe book with the name, I kid you not, “Pow Wow Chow.” But here’s the best part of the story. She plagiarized some of the recipes. Yes indeed, her version of “pow wow chow” came directly from a famous French chef.

My second-favorite Warren story involves breastfeeding. She once claimed to be the first “nursing mother” to take the New Jersey bar exam, making her, I suppose, the Jackie Robinson of lactating lawyers. The problem? There’s no evidence this is true. Women have been taking the New Jersey bar since 1895, and the New Jersey Judiciary was “not aware” whether they tracked the nursing habits of test-takers.

A new set of laws suggested by the “liberal government” ruling Denmark, is expected to be brought to parliament soon. The set of laws are set to counter influences of foreign intelligence services mainly aimed at Russia and breaking them could get you up to 12 years in jail. The suggested laws would make it illegal to share opinions, news articles or anything that could influence public opinion in any way, if it so happens to coincide with views shared by “foreign intelligence services”, even if it’s related to internal social politics and you weren't aware of it.

In 2015, Israel approved a law that stipulated a 20 year prison sentence for individuals caught throwing stones. The intention was to target Palestinians involved in resistance activities, despite the discrepancies between armed Jewish Israeli settlers and Palestinians in terms of weapons available for them to use. “Tolerance towards terrorists ends today,” commented Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked. “A stone thrower is a terrorist and only a fitting punishment can serve as a deterrent and just punishment.”

Yet despite claiming that Palestinians who throw stones during clashes “provoke” unwarranted violence, stone throwing by Jewish Israeli settler-colonists has many precedents and victims, and is usually overlooked. The latest Palestinian victim of Jewish stone-throwers was Aisha Al-Rabi who was killed last Friday while on her way home in the car. Settlers hurled stones at the family car, killing Aisha and injuring her husband Yacoub.

The Israelis military is killing kids in the Gaza Strip – like, on the regular. You wouldn’t know it though; not unless you watch the BBC or Al Jazeera, that is. The uncomfortable truth is this: most Americans, frankly, don’t care. Most of the populace and a bipartisan coalition of nearly all policymakers are so reflexively pro-Israel that any critique of Israeli militarism is immediately labeled as anti-Semitism.

Nevertheless, Americans should start paying attention. We in the U.S. are, after all, veritably obsessed with our national security. So much so, indeed, that Washington has waged a perpetual "war on terror" across the Greater Middle East and Africa, restricted some civil liberties, and garrisoned the globe with hundreds of foreign military bases. The problem is that none of this expeditionary military action has made the homeland safer or lessened the appeal of violent jihadi Islam.

Mayor of Bethlehem, advocate Anton Salman said, in response to Sunday’s statements by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Bethlehem and the situation of Palestinian Christians, that such a statement “is another Israeli attempt at distorting the reality of the Israeli occupation and particularly the effects that Israeli policies have had on the Palestinian Christian community since 1948.”

Lets say prior to 2003, that I had evidence that the Bush Administration, neocons and press, were intentionally lying about Iraq. Note that I said lying not just mistaken. Well this isn’t hypothetical. The Niger forgeries are a clear case of deception. One cannot accidentally sign documents with a name of an obsolete foreign minister. Its clear that these were fraudulent and that they were being used as war propaganda. Who am I supposed to go to with this information? The president? He didn’t care. The press? They don’t care. In fact the press still hasn’t clearly reported on it even after the fact.

A dozen years ago Alison Weir described how U.S. media ignored a Palestinian death… This pattern has persisted year after year after year… And another Palestinian mother has just been killed…

Almost no one bothered to report it. A search of the nation’s largest newspapers turned up nothing in USA Today, the Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Chicago Sun-Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Houston Chronicle, Tampa Tribune, etc.

Up to 3,000 migrants crossed from Honduras into Guatemala on Monday on a trek northward, after a standoff with police in riot gear and warnings from Washington that migrants should not try to enter the United States illegally.

The crowd more than doubled in size from Saturday, when some 1,300 people set off from northern Honduras in what has been dubbed "March of the Migrant," an organizer said. The migrants plan to seek refugee status in Mexico or pass through to the United States.

Reuters could not independently verify the number of participants, but images showed a group carrying backpacks and clogging roads near the border, some waving the Honduran flag.

Homeland Security was explicit in their 18-page memo from June 2017 that “the only way for an individual to ensure he or she is not subject to collection of biometric information when traveling internationally is to refrain from traveling.” Now, according to a new “Biometric Roadmap” from the TSA, detailed below by The Identity Project, we can see the level of commitment to accelerating incremental enforcement for all domestic and international air travel (“notional phased approach” in TSA-speak). Of course when it comes to the TSA, airports may not be the final destination. Biometric ID is already spreading from planes, to trains, to events and to conferences.

The two Koreas agreed on Monday to begin reconnecting rail and road links, another step in an improving relationship in spite of U.S. concerns that the rapid North-South thaw could undermine efforts to press North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons.

Has North Korea’s economy been growing under sanctions? That’s what an economist in Pyongyang claims. In a recent interview with Kyodo (published here by Japan Times), Ri Gi Song at Pyongyang’s Institute of Economics at the Academy of Social Sciences, claimed that North Korea’s GDP per capita grew by 3.7 percent in 2017, a year during which the country was virtually banned from selling its most crucial export goods, and faced very harsh conditions for importing crucial resources such as oil and fuel. When factoring in population growth, the GDP-growth-figure diminishes somewhat to 3.2% (see below), but it’s still firmly in the same range.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s top envoy for North Korea will travel to Moscow for meetings this week about the denuclearization process, officials with both sides confirmed Monday.

"We will hold a full round of consultations on the situation on the Korean Peninsula,” Russian deputy foreign minister Igor Morgulov said Monday, according to state-run TASS.

Stephen Biegun, the U.S. special representative for North Korea, will stop in Moscow Tuesday before heading west to Paris and Brussels. His trip comes on the heels of a separate summit Morgulov hosted with North Korean and Chinese diplomats, which saw the two Eastern powers back the pariah state’s call for sanctions relief in the midst of negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs.

An American student of Palestinian descent detained in Israel’s airport for nearly a fortnight has become an unexpected cause celebre. Lara Alqasem was refused entry under legislation passed last year against boycott activists, and Israeli courts are now deciding whether allowing her to study human rights at an Israeli university threatens public order.

Usually those held at the border are swiftly deported, but Ms Alqasem appealed against the decision, becoming in the process an improbable “prisoner of conscience” for the boycott cause.

The Israeli government, led by strategic affairs minister Gilad Erdan, claims that the 22-year-old is a leader of the growing international boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. Activists like Ms Alqasem, he argues, demonise Israel.

It’s not often that the president of the United States writes an op-ed for a major newspaper. But this is exactly what President Trump did on October 10 in USA Today.

Trump was railing against (and rightly so) the Democrats’ “Medicare for All” (S.1804) proposal to “establish a government-run, single-payer health care system that eliminates all private and employer-based health care plans” and will “cost an astonishing $32.6 trillion during its first 10 years.”

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has distinguished his company from other big tech firms in declaring its willingness to work with the United States Department of Defense.

“If big tech companies are going to turn their back on the US Department of Defense, this country is going to be in trouble,” Bezos cautioned in San Francisco Monday at an event celebrating the 25th anniversary of the tech magazine Wired.

Amazon is bidding for a 10-year contract with the Defense Department known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure project, JEDI, to offer cloud computing services worth up to $10 billion.

“We are going to continue to support the DoD, and I think we should,” Bezos said.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Monday lit into federal judges for what he called a dramatic uptick in “outrageous” decisions threatening to interfere with the separation of powers by exposing internal White House deliberations.

In a fiery speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, Sessions warned that “once we go down this road in American government, there is no turning back.” He vowed to take “these discovery fights to the Supreme Court in emergency postures. … We intend to fight this, and we intend to win.”

Sessions specifically singled out New York district court judge Jesse M. Furman, who ruled that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross could be questioned in an ongoing lawsuit concerning the legality of the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

The owners of the only home still standing on a stretch of a Florida beach after Hurricane Michael tore through say they built it to survive the 'big one'.

Dr Lebron Lackey and his uncle Russell King built the vacation home known as Sand Palace last year at Mexico Beach where the Category 4 hurricane made landfall with 155mph winds last week.

Remarkable aerial photos that emerged after the hurricane show the home still standing, while neighboring properties were reduced to rubble or completely swept away by storm surge.

'We built it to survive the big one,' Lackey told CNN.